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Spotting controlling behaviour in people has never been as transparent to the general public as it is at the moment.
At the risk of sounding like one of those dodgy one tip to lose tummy fat web ad’s, the one big sign that gives people away is this: if a person has any thing to say about another person having had a Covid-19 vaccine or not.
Anyone (other than authorities such as the government, scientists, etc) that has an opinion about another persons vaccination status is openly displaying some fairly controlling behaviour.
Another persons vaccine status and decision on their body is really nobody else’s business but the individuals, and when I see people coming out with terms like “un-vaccinated people are selfish”, “un-vaccinated people should lose their right to healthcare”, I realise that I feel so uncomfortable about it due to how dreadful pushing an opinion on others really is. It is akin to extremism, but has another air to it that I cannot quite pin down yet.
Questioning helped get me through.
Did we have this sort of attitude with other vaccinations?
In the unfortunate divide that has been created, what is different?
I’ll tell ya what I think at least. The difference is, social media / internet use.
People do not seem to understand how the information that we take in, scrolling through feeds and streams of it, shapes our own realities drastically more than the every day user would like to think. Yes we can curate things but we only have to take a quick glance at how politics and even BTS seeped into the lives of those who otherwise would not be interested.
Many people also do not have knowledge of things like Social Contagion, Collective Behaviour and the quietly insidious effects that these can wield on our own free agency.
Boundary busting, isn't it?
Plenty of us either mindful of, just learning, or adept at keeping personal boundaries intact can remain oblivious to those boundaries that we allow to be crossed online. Just by logging into an open text messaging service to the entire globe, such as Twitter, we gladly expose ourselves to the world of almost everything, trolling, hate crime, and other shitty stuff included. Many of us are already angry about being burned by companies like Facebook, a place where almost the entire content of lives and families were uploaded without question.
They were trusted. None of us knew.
Luckily, boundaries can be reinstated, but that almost always takes a bit of a shock to the system in realising that very quietly, without our realising, our boundaries were being crossed, and we may have been taking that into our everyday lives, with some being taught that boundary evasion is okay on both sides of the coin, being the crosser or the crossed.
The question we all have to ask ourselves is exactly that, is it ever okay to cross boundaries either way, both offline and online?. Asking ourselves this question can help us see where we are in terms of personal growth and whether we really are working towards a better society all round for humanity.
Keep being amazing :-)